RaaW Adult Dog Food: Salmon review

All four of these finish in our Outstanding band, and the raw field's midpoint lies there too. RaaW is keeping company with the strongest part of the market. Protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency all read Outstanding on every recipe, with value reading Outstanding alongside them, and the Beef and the Lamb edge the range by the slimmest of margins. Raw earns results like this because the format works from named meat with almost nothing standing in for it, and these four labels do exactly that.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon (41%), British Chicken with Bone (33%), British Chicken Heart (5%), Carrots, Carrots Squash, Broccoli, Sunflower seeds, Spinach powder, Blueberries, Sea Kelp powder, Chia seeds

Three of the four recipes share a construction raw feeders will recognise on sight. A headline animal with its bone leads at between 62% and 70%, with heart and other organ meats declared behind it. Vegetables, berries, seeds and kelp follow. The percentages stop once the animal ingredients are done, so the plant side is listed in descending order without figures against it.

Bone sits inside the meat percentage rather than arriving as an added mineral, which is how raw is meant to work. Only the Salmon gives us a calcium reading, converting to 3.13% of dry matter, a sound figure for a bone-in recipe. The other three print no calcium at all, so the bone is visible in the composition without being quantified in the analysis.

Organ meats do a lot of quiet work here. The Beef carries heart at 8%, kidney at 5% and liver at 5%, the Chicken carries heart and liver at 5% each, and the Salmon brings chicken heart at 5%. Liver is the single richest natural source of vitamin A and the B group a raw recipe can hold, and heart is lean muscle carrying taurine. That is exactly the sort of inclusion that lets a recipe stand up without a synthetic premix behind it.

The Lamb is built differently and it is worth saying so plainly. Lamb trim is declared at 70% and nothing else from the animal is named, so there is no bone and no organ meat on that label. What follows is spinach powder, salmon oil, kelp, cranberry, brewer's yeast and dandelion, all of it botanical. It reads as a rich lamb mince, not a full prey model recipe. That is a fine thing to have in a rotation, and useful to know if it is the only thing in your freezer.

The plant list barely changes: carrots, butternut squash, broccoli, spinach powder and blueberries, with sunflower seeds in the poultry and fish recipes and chia seeds through most of the range. Chia brings plant omega 3 fats and soluble fibre, kelp powder brings iodine and trace minerals, and the alfalfa in the Beef adds a green source of vitamin K. None of these carry a figure. Read them as seasoning on a meat recipe.

On a dry matter basis the analyses read properly meaty: protein between 39.7% and 54.3%, fat between 26.8% and 46.3%, and carbohydrate no higher than 12.9% with the Salmon estimating at zero. No label declares an energy figure, so the ones on this page are our estimate.

Salmon at 41% with British chicken and bone at 33% behind it, plus 5% chicken heart, which makes this a fish and poultry recipe rather than a fish one. Protein tops the four at 54.3% of dry matter, and it alone prints a calcium reading, at 3.13%.

£4.58 a kilo across all four recipes. They come as 1.2kg packs. They are sold singly, or in boxes of four, six or twelve.

A moderately built 15kg adult needs somewhere near 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). Against our estimated energy figures that works out at 467 grams a day on the Beef, 500 on the Lamb, 534 on the Salmon and 700 on the Chicken. That is between £2.14 and £3.21 a day depending which one you feed.